The Dynamic Tensions Physical Culture Show
- Submitting institution
-
Brunel University London
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 037-184052-16646
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Anatomy Museum, Kings College London
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first performance
- October
- Year of first performance
- 2018
- URL
-
https://doi.org/10.17633/rd.brunel.5835813
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
4 - Theatre
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The purpose of the research was to investigate how men negotiate their relationship to the ideal of the strong, athletic, and muscular male body (especially with the knowledge that it can be destructive to self and others); how fitness can be seen as a form of self-expression and creative practice; how men can use fitness as a way of relating to self and others. I wanted to produce a theatrical performance that stages a counter-genealogy of “built masculinities” by exposing the origins of physical culture (a movement prefiguring contemporary fitness) in the late 19th and early 20th century vaudeville theatres and Music Halls.
I engaged performers with a background in both performance and sport/fitness. Through a series of workshops in 2017, the group explored historical documents (reviews, drawings, photos) of early “physical culture” performances in the 19th and 20th century theatre. Rather than re-enact these performances, the documents acted as catalysts for performative “self-reflection” through which the men performed their life histories through words and embodied gesture. The project can be aligned with arts-based research methodologies in qualitative research in sport and exercise.
The research findings demonstrate how the muscular, athletic male body ideal is a cultural script, but it is no less “real”, because it is produced through embodied labour(s) of everyday performance. Physical culture practices evidence the body’s conditioning along cultural scripts, but create a kinesthetic experience that is the basis for variation. Physical culture, exists in the “dynamic tensions” between the institutions, industries, and social structures of physical fitness and the participant’s individual bodily experience. The research, in its own dynamic tension between representation and the real (presenting acts of sport and fitness on stage), reveals the dialectical construction behind the manly tropes of the strongman, the bodybuilder, the wrestler, the rugby player, and the weightlifter.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -